It was supposed to be every writer’s dream when a Hollywood film producer bought the option to adapt my memoir for the big screen. Love with a Chance of Drowning was due to publish in three months time but the love itself was drowning. Quickly. Painfully. Publicly.

I lost my dad last night. He has battled cancer for three years. We were all in the room when he passed away : his six girls and my mum, plus many of his grandkids too. I can tell you that there was a whole lot of love packed into that little room. It was sad and beautiful all at once.

I’m bad at completing projects, so when I began writing a book, I feared it would end up frolicking with the dusty bunnies in the corner of my neglected projects room. This is how I found the determination to finish …

I think about death a lot – like, all-the-freaking-time a lot. I think about death as much as most people think about fun, happy, pleasurable things. (Like petting puppies! I was talking about puppies! What did you think I was talking about, sicko?)

As with any great adventure, it began with a carefully orchestrated plan. Funds carefully procured and squirreled away, third-world-travel immunisation shots and pills carefully administered, maps carefully studied and marked up …

“Holy Sh*t I’m going to die!” are words that have crossed my mind many, many times on my last two bike rides from London to Cape Town via the Middle East and from Korea to Cape Town via the Axis of Evil. I got shot at in Afghanistan, knocked off my bicycle (lots) by taxi drivers in South Africa …

It’s a black night and the wind is vile. The waves must be twenty feet high. We’re tipping, staggering, flying down each angry wave and my stomach keeps bottoming out like we’re in a plummeting elevator. Our little boat, Amazing Grace, isn’t so amazing right now …